Once again your phone is spying on you. Sprint created a service to allow law enforcement to query customer GPS data because they could not keep up with the number of requests. According to a Sprint rep this service has been accessed over 8 million times in the last year according to the Wired Threat Level Story.

The story goes on to state that there are only 4 valid circumstances for law enforcement to request this data.

1) under the authority of a court order;

2) to track the location of a customer who has made a 911 call;

3) in an emergency situation, such as tracking someone lost in the wilderness or trying to locate an abducted child or hostage;

4) with a customer’s consent.

Most like it is under point 4 that these requests have been made. You might want to read over you service agreement again. There is probably some fine print legaleze which grants law enforcement open access.

Sprint right now is the smallest of the big 3 carriers in the US. One can only wonder what the stats for Verizon or AT&T might be.

The Wall Street Journal, NYT and others are reporting about a large amount of cracked emails posted to the internet detailing the unethical promotion of man made global warming.

Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.

"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."

In all, more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents were stolen Thursday from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K. The identity of the hackers isn't certain, but the files were posted on a Russian file-sharing server late Thursday, and university officials confirmed over the weekend that their computer had been attacked and said the documents appeared to be genuine.

The IPCC couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.

In one email, Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., wrote to the director of the climate-study center that he was "tempted to beat" up Mr. Michaels. Mr. Santer couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.

The emails were published less than a month before the opening of a major climate-change summit in Copenhagen.

Representatives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a large professional organization, expressed concern that the hacked emails would weaken global resolve to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The association believes "that climate change is real, it is related to human activities, and the need to counteract its impacts is now urgent," said Ginger Pinholster, an association spokeswoman. She added that the association's journal, Science, evaluates papers solely on scientific merit.

John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attacked in the emails for asking that an IPCC report include dissenting viewpoints, said, "It's disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested."

Mojib Latif, a climate researcher at Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, said he found it hard to believe that climate scientists were trying to squelch dissent. Mr. Latif, who believes in man-made global warming but who has co-authored a paper ascribing current cooling to temporary natural trends, said, "I simply can't believe that there is a kind of mafia that is trying to inhibit critical papers from being published."

Also included in the pirated email is numerous discussions about cleaning up email trails to prevent information from getting out. As the article points out this could not happen at a worst time for the Pro AGW crowd since Copenhagen is only a few weeks away.

Update

Bishop Hill has links to the hacked documents and a description of each here.

The Huffington Post has an article outlining how 25 of the top bailout receipients have thus far spent 71 million on lobbying against such reforms as The Credit Card Reform Act, and the abillity for bankruptcy lawyers to renegotiate mortgages. The New York Times and Reuters have artices outlining out about 40 congressmen 20 from each party, used the same talking points and verbiage when discussing health care reform. Which isn't a problem except the talking points were provided by Genentech lobbyist.

Now that the Senate has passed the healthcare act out of commitee - which looks to be the biggest windfall for insurance companies ever - have you begun to realize how important it is to stand up and vote these people out of office yet? The Congress and Senate both openly accept cash contributions for supporting the viewpoints as provided by lobbyists. Yet even though this is the case, over and over again they are voted back into office.

Pay attention folks, vote em out, because otherwise you are getting what you deserve.

My friend Jim over at Critical Bookwork sent me a link to an article over at hillbuz. Its a moving article thanking President Bush from a bunch of former Bush Bashers. Its worth a read if nothing else to remind ourselves that no matter your opinion on the guy, President Bush had a decent heart in him. The comments are worth a read as well.

London Telegraph has an article about how British ISP's and Telco's are required by law to keep a record of every customers personal communications showing who they contact, when and where, what websites they visit. This information will be made available to 653 public bodoes including police, local councils, Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, Fire Department, even prison wardens.

The best part of the artricle is the ironic statement

Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a single government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.

Think it can't happen in the states? Check out the latest go around with IndyMedia.us when the Justice Departement demanded all records of visitors for June 25 then demanded that the site keep mum about the request. The UK is just a little further along then the US.

Over on the tenth admendment center they have a great write up on Nancy Pelosi's response to the idea that a state could refuse to participate in Obamacare.

A state is free to refuse the support and refuse to assist the federal government in administering the program, but Congress can authorize the federal government to administer the program on its own. Thus, Congress cannot force a state to administer a health insurance exchange, but it can authorize the federal government to administer such an exchange in any state that declines to do so

Basically a state is within its rights to refuse, but the federal government will ignore it and run it themselves.